The Slavery of Death

Prelude

The Sting of Death

1.

T he sting of death is sin.

So wrote the Apostle Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians.¹ It’s a curious formulation if you ponder it, particularly if you come from a Protestant tradition. As Protestants we tend to think that sin is our primary predicament, the reason Jesus Christ died at Golgotha—his death an atoning sacrifice for our sins. But in his words to the Corinthians Paul seems to suggest that sin is a consequence of death. If so, death might be our deeper, more significant problem. Sin might be less the disease than a symptom. Death, in this view, is the cause of sin.

This is a peculiar reversal for many Protestants who have tended to think that death is the consequence of sin. It’s sin that causes death, not the other way around. The impulse here is less the sting of death is sin than the refrain from Romans 6:23—The wages of sin is death. And such an understanding is supported by the story in Genesis 3 where, after the primal sin, Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden and separated from the Tree of Life. Romans 5:12: Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned. The sin of Adam and Eve, a sin we recapitulate, brings death into the world—both physical death (mortality) and spiritual death (separation from God).

And yet, there are many passages within the New Testament that place death at the center of the human predicament. For example, it is death, rather than sin, that is considered to be the last enemy (1 Cor 15:24–25). In the book of Revelation the last thing to be thrown into the Lake of Fire is death and Hades. And at the end of Romans 7, Paul’s long discussion of his experience in wrestling with sin, he concludes with a peculiar cry: What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? The root of Paul’s sin problem seems to be that he has, just like the rest of us, a body that is subject to death.

Another facet of this perspective worth noting is how the Bible describes the activity of the devil. Throughout the New Testament sin, death, and the devil are at times described as almost interchangeable forces, three facets of an ontological unity—a sort of unholy Trinity. Consequently, if we are to have a full biblical understanding concerning the work of Jesus—the work he accomplished in his life, death, and resurrection—we must pay attention to texts like 1 John 3:8: The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. What is this work of the devil? And how was it destroyed? Most Protestants tend to reduce the role of Satan to that of tempter, and undeniably that is a part of the picture. But the New Testament also describes Satan as holding the power of death. As it says in Hebrews 2:14, the death of Jesus was intended to destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil. This victory over the devil is reaffirmed in the opening vision of Revelation where the Resurrected Lord is declared to be holding the keys of death and Hades. Death, once under the power of Satan, is now under the power of Christ.

While this focus on the devil might seem strange to many modern Christians, particularly liberal Christians, this material in the New Testament continues to highlight the centrality of death in the human predicament. Death is seen as the power of the devil in our lives. And one reason—perhaps even the primary reason—for Christ’s death on the cross was to rob the devil of this power. The reason Christ appeared was to free those who, in the words of Hebrews 2:15, were all their lives enslaved to the fear of death.

2.

This book will work with a reversal of the traditional Protestant understanding regarding the causal association between sin and death. The traditional understanding:

Protestant Formulation:

Sin causes Death.

Biblical articulation: The wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23).

The frame we will be focusing on reverses this association. This is an understanding that has been largely marginalized within the Protestant tradition. However, as we will see, this understanding was common in the first centuries of the church and it continues to inform the Eastern Orthodox church:

Orthodox Formulation:

Death causes Sin.

Biblical articulation: The sting of death is sin (1 Cor 15:56).

Looking at both formulations, what we find is a complex causal tangle, even before we throw the devil into the mix. So to be clear, the perspective of this book, which emphasizes the moral impact of death upon our lives, isn’t an attempt to replace the Protestant framing. Rather, the goal is to point out how the Protestant tradition, in placing the primary emphasis upon sin, has ignored a wealth of biblical material regarding the nature of sin and salvation. The Bible presents us with a dense and complex causal matrix in which sin, death, and the devil all mutually interact. Consequently, an exclusive focus on sin tends to oversimplify the dynamics of our moral struggles. I argue that a fuller analysis is critical as it will present us with a clearer picture of Christian virtue—love in particular. By exposing the dynamics of the devil’s work in our lives, works produced by a slavery to the fear of death, we will be better positioned to resist the satanic influences in our lives, better equipped to do battle with the principalities and powers of darkness, and better able to love as Christ loved us.

3.

As noted above, while treating death as our primary predicament may seem strange to some, this perspective is the norm within the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Thus much of this book (particularly Part 1) will mine the riches of the Orthodox tradition, which brings us to a question: If a great deal of the theological material included can be found within the Orthodox tradition, why should one choose to read a book written by a Protestant psychologist?

Excellent question.

The answer goes back to the biblical notion of Satan wielding the power of death. What sort of power is this? How exactly does death have power, a moral power, over us? A text that unpacks this dynamic—the moral power of death—is Hebrews 2:14–15:

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

The power of death that the devil wields is characterized here as a slavery to the fear of death. It is not death per se that gives the devil power. It is, rather, the fear of death. It is this fear that creates the satanic influence, a fear that tempts us into sinful practices and lifestyles, a fear that keeps us demonically possessed in our idolatrous service to the principalities and powers.

Salvation, then, involves liberation from this fear. Salvation is emancipation for those who have been enslaved all of their lives by the fear of death. Salvation is a deliverance that sets us free from this power of the devil.

What might be the sign of this liberation? In the biblical imagination the antithesis of fear is love. Freedom from the fear of death makes love possible. As it says in 1 John 4:18, There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear . . . Where fear is a symptom of death, love becomes a sign of resurrection: Anyone who does not love remains in death (1 John 3:14). Where we find fear and death on one side, we find love and resurrection on the other.

Here, then, is where psychology fits into the picture. While there is a great deal of theological literature to consult regarding Orthodox or Christus Victor theology, there is precious little work from theologians on how death anxiety produces the works of the devil. There is, however, a great deal of psychological literature—both empirical and theoretical—that has connected death anxiety with a variety of unhealthy outcomes—psychological, social, and moral. This psychological research holds great potential for unpacking what the Bible describes as slavery to the fear of death. This psychological research also has something interesting to say about why perfect love must cast out fear.

To date, however, no one has brought this psychological research into conversation with theology. I hope this book will help start that conversation. So while it may seem strange to find a psychologist writing about Orthodox theology, the ultimate goal of this book is to understand what slavery to the fear of death might look like, psychologically speaking, and to explore how perfect love must involve a liberation from this fear.

And since this book is about the relationship between fear and love, a theologically minded psychologist might not be such a bad guide after all.

4.

This book, then, is a prolonged meditation on the role of death anxiety in producing the devil’s works. The book brings modern psychological science into conversation with Orthodox theology to illuminate what the writer of Hebrews describes as slavery to the fear of death. Phrased positively, the book is a psychological and theological analysis of perfect love and why it must cast out fear.

As we’ll come to see in the chapters that follow, slavery to the fear of death affects every facet of the human experience, even the most mundane and workaday. This book is written in the hope that if the dynamics of this slavery are exposed and the deep roots of our sinful practices brought into the light, we might be better able to cast out fear in the name of love. But what makes this so hard, as we will come to see, is that our slavery to the fear of death is often so deep, hidden, and repressed that at times it can be impossible to detect our bondage. Then again, this predicament isn’t all that surprising. As the Bible warns, the devil often comes to us disguised as an angel of light.

5.

An overview of the book:

Part 1 provides a brief and selective theological summary of Orthodox theology that highlights the role of death as the cause of sin and the works of the devil. The goal of Part 1 is to help those unfamiliar with this approach, particularly Protestants, to imagine the reversal we have discussed above, seeing death as our central and defining predicament.

After laying a theological foundation in Part 1, we’ll turn to psychology in Part 2 and unpack Part 1’s content in light of modern psychological research. In other words, Part 2 will describe the slavery to the fear of death and its role in producing the devil’s works from a psychological perspective, attempting to translate theology into something psychologically recognizable. How, exactly, might I be enslaved to the fear of death in my day-to-day experiences and interactions with others? And how might this slavery cause me to behave sinfully? With a concrete psychological picture in hand we’ll be better positioned to understand what love involves from within the Christian experience. Part 3, then, will focus on love, concluding with a positive discussion of how love leads to emancipation from the fear of death and how that liberation might be accomplished.

1.

1

Cor

15

:

56

NIV.

Part

1

The Last Enemy

Chapter 1

Ancestral Sin

1.

The central contention of this book is that death, not sin, is the primary predicament of the human condition. Death is the cause of sin. More properly, the fear of death produces most of the sin in our lives.

The most obvious objection to this line of argument is an appeal to the sequence recounted in Genesis 3, a sequence Paul later echoes in Romans 5:12. As the Genesis text describes, Adam and Eve’s original disobedience effected a separation from the Tree of Life, and that first sin is what introduced both death and mortality into the world. Clearly, then, sin brings about death and not the other way around. And doesn’t Paul affirm that the wages of sin is death?

No doubt that in the Genesis story a primal disobedience precedes the introduction of death into the world. In that account, sin comes first and results in death—this much seems clear. But the issue we must consider as we go forward is this: how much of our current situation can be modeled on the story of the primal sin? To cut to the chase, we’re not in Eden anymore. Unlike Adam and Eve, we are born into a mortal state, subject to death from the moment of conception. Before our moral lives begin—before we sin—we are born into a death-saturated existence. Unlike Adam and Eve, death predates us. We live in a very different sort of world than the one described in Genesis 1–2.

In short, the issue going forward, from a biblical perspective, is less about what happened at the start of the story than about the world created by that story. In Genesis sin might have predated death for Adam and Eve. But in our experience death predates our sin or, at the very least, any moral choices we make. And if death predates our sin, might death be implicated in causing our sin? Might sin be the sting—the poisonous outcome—of death?

2.

We might, then, want to pause and reconsider what exactly we inherited from Adam and Eve in the Genesis story and how that inheritance affects us—morally, spiritually, psychologically, socially, physically, and ecologically. Our particular focus will be on how this inheritance helps us understand the relationship between sin and death.

In Western Christianity this inheritance has generally been understood to be what is called original sin. Adam and Eve passed on moral brokenness and incapacity, and thus humanity, in this view, is intrinsically sinful. Those who hold to this belief view sin as a congenital moral and spiritual defect that is passed down to us from Adam and Eve, affecting and infecting every living person.¹ In many ways the doctrine of original sin preserves and recapitulates the primal ordering of sin and death in the biography of every person. Since each of us is born in sin, sin remains the primary predicament, the prime mover and original cause, just as it was with Adam and Eve. And just like Adam and Eve this sinful nature leads us to sin, which then introduces death—both spiritual and physical—into each of our personal biographies. We retrace the story of Genesis 3—sin is our central problem, the causal agent that brings death into our worlds.

3.

The doctrine of original sin is well known, but that’s not to say that it is uncontested in Western Christianity. Still, for our purposes even those whose traditions reject the doctrine retain the basic sin/death sequence. That is, they believe that even if infants are born innocent they will eventually reach an age of accountability